The Spectator Bird (6 page)

Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the glint of moving oilskins out on the foredeck. A cluster of figures huddled out there, hanging onto each other or to the davits of a lifeboat, intent on something at their center. They hulked like conspirators, bent away from wind and rain, and in my scared condition I had the wild idea they were planning like a lot of Lord Jims to abandon ship and let all the pilgrims perish. For a minute or two they leaned and clung together. Then they fell back into a ragged line, two of them bent and lifted, and there went Bertelson down the plank and into that appalling sea.

There is no word for how instant his obliteration was. The second after they stooped, he was not. With hardly a pause the oilskinned figures started in, and I saw that two of them were supporting a third who sagged and staggered. Mrs. Bertelson. Why they let her watch that, God knows. Maybe, in her piety and wretchedness, she had insisted on seeing her husband go to God.

I fled ahead of them down the companionway and up to our own safe door. As I took hold of the knob I felt or heard the renewed throb of the engines, and by the time I was back in my berth the
Stockholm
was beginning once more to drive her nose into the seas.

So fast, so total an erasure. Spurlos verloren. And now this afternoon, with their raging efficiency or whatever it is, they've already got his wife out on the foredeck, wrapped in rugs and shot full of sedatives. The wind has dropped again, but not far, and the sea even in daylight is nothing she should be contemplating. There she sits, staring with dumb, drugged suffering at the North Atlantic. And a strange thing: now that she is stricken, people avoid her more than they did when she was only cowlike and uninteresting. Me too. Ruth sat by her for an hour and tried to talk to her, but I couldn't. What would I have said? I thought her husband foolish and bigoted and dull, and now that he is dead it would be hypocrisy to pretend differently.

I would like to be able to suffer fools more gladly. I am too likely to be contemptuous of people when their minds don't work at least as fast as mine. Curtis too, Curtis too. Maybe, whenever I am tempted to be snobbish, I can make myself remember the chaos and old night that Bertelson vanished into. Not even the most foolish and bigoted member of Lutheran Christendom deserves to be wiped out like that.

Also I can't forget that it was in the ocean—another and pleasanter ocean than this one, but part of the same element-that Curtis was knocked from or let go of his surfboard, and his last breath was water.

 

Agents, like publishers, get to be instant readers—they could carry the gospel of Evelyn Wood through the world. Hamlet in twelve minutes, Tolstoi in twenty. My eye, ranging down the page, saw something coming that I didn't want to get into—some of the breast beating and the Why, why, why, where did I begin to do it wrong, how did I manage to destroy the one person, besides Ruth, to whom I wished only to be kind and loving? I would have given him a kidney if he had needed it, they could have transplanted my heart. So I became his schoolmaster and his jailer and his judge.

I was not going to read all that to Ruth. Maybe I will go back and read it over, maybe I will read it many times, and maybe in tears, but I wasn't going to dump it on her. With only the most momentary hesitation, I flipped that page and turned it under, and when I glanced up briefly I saw that she understood exactly what I had done.

I went on reading, though what followed wasn't much more cheerful than what I had censored.

 

Once in college, trying to determine some optical truth or other, we taped distorting spectacles on a laboratory chicken and threw her some feed. At first she would cock her head, take aim, and miss a grain of corn by as much as an inch, but after a while she learned how to correct for the astigmatism we had imposed on her, and once she got the hang of it she was as accurate as ever with either eye.

Well, right now, while Ruth sleeps and I do not, and this queasy ship carries us through the undiminished seas, I feel like a grain of corn, with the Great Chicken of the Universe standing over me taking aim. I don't know whether she has binocular vision or not, she may be blind in both eyes for all I know. But she is not going to miss me when she pecks. I have made a point of not believing in distorting spectacles. Any hen worth a dollar can recover from them in a few hours. Bertelson probably thought he had her whammied with his sixty-five years of piety, and look what happened to him.

Moral: You can't trust optics, but you can depend on appetite.

 

Again I looked across at Ruth. She made a rueful, sympathetic smile, and her eyes were shiny. She obviously wanted to pat me and kiss me better. “Poor lamb,” she said. “You were so miserable, and fighting yourself so. I guess I was so miserable myself on that voyage I didn't realize how bad it was for you.”

Often I submit to her sympathy. I depend on it, in fact. But right then I chose to be flippant. “Despite all my efforts,” I said. “I wore my bruised spirit in my buttonhole, and took frequent whiffs, and turned up my eyes, and you never noticed.”

“But you didn't. You didn't let on to me. You kept it to yourself.”

“And why not?” I said. “That's the beauty of a journal. That's where you meet the really sympathetic audience.”

She understood that, too, and it annoyed her. She pulled Catarrh down from under her chin a little too impatiently, and had to disengage his claws from her dressing gown. “Why do you have to jeer?” she said. “Whenever you give away your feelings the least little bit, you have to jeer and cover up.”

Trapped in my own role, I said, not very originally, “Beneath this harsh exterior beats a heart of stone.”

She stared at me as if she couldn't believe me, and the longer she looked at me the more irritated she became. She is not a hard woman to exasperate, especially when I shy away from being comforted or mothered. “Sometimes I think you should take your own advice,” she said.

“What advice?”

“To suffer fools more glady. Beginning with yourself.”

Having said that, she obviously found herself furious. She startled herself, I think, with her own vehemence. I might easily have said something that would have wounded and frustrated her even more. After forty-five years we can still, if we let ourselves, bristle and bump one another around like a pair of stiff-legged dogs. Fortunately I played it light, for the fact was that I really hadn't intended to hurt her feelings. So I shrugged. “Maybe so.”

She had no reason to go on, but as the injured party she had to have the last word. “I wish I understood you. You drive me wild, you really do. For a change we're doing something together, sort of reliving something, something as sad as it could possibly be, and important to us both, and you brought it all back so clearly, and I was interested, and touched, and then you have to start mugging and hoofing, and spoil it.”

The telephone rang, and since Ruth was encumbered with the cat, I reached across to the bed table and answered it.

“Hello, Joe?”

Ben Alexander. On the telephone his voice is even wheezier, breezier, and louder than it is face to face.

“Present.” “Been thinking. Why wait for lunch? I want to have Tom and Edith up to dinner Friday. Can you and Ruth come?”

“Why, I guess so. Let me speak to the foreman.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Ruth, “Ben wants us for dinner with the Pattersons Friday. Can we go?”

She checked the calendar and found nothing but a hair appointment “Do you want to?”

“Do you?”

“Sure, I guess so. Why not? But you've been so funny lately about going out.”

“I'm always ready for Ben's house, especially as long as he makes that Cabernet.”

“That's probably it,” she said, practically with a sniff. “All right, tell him yes.”

I told him yes.

“Swell,” he said. “Friday at seven.”

Bang in my ear, as if he had tossed the instrument into its cradle from six feet away.

“That old rip,” I said. “He's got more left at nearly eighty than most of us had at eighteen. Running around in his convertible. Why hasn't he got sore joints? Why doesn't he ever get tired?”

“What makes you think he doesn't?” Ruth said. “He's got that metal hip joint, he walks with a cane, his heart runs by electronics, he's alone, and probably lonely. Why do you think he's any luckier than you?”

“I didn't say he was luckier. I said he had more left than anybody his age should have. Sons of missionaries must learn early to get around God.”

“Come on,” she said, and let her hands fall and her shoulders droop as if in defeat. “Come on, read some more before we get into a real fight.”

“You don't want to hear any more.”

“Of course I want to hear more!”

“The perils of the deep are nearly over,” I said. “From here on it's less profound but with more local color.”

 

April 3:

Cøteborg, two days late. In three hours ashore I discover that the solid ground of Sweden is as unstable as the North Atlantic. Doped with more than a week of Dramamine, I stand looking at statues and town halls and into store windows, and as I look they start to lean and roll. Which is maybe the way things look to Mrs. Bertelson, too. She is met by a couple of relatives and a representative of the Swedish-American Line and driven off the dock in a car. The Swedish-American Line man has to interpret—Mrs. B's in-laws have no English, and she can't understand their Swedish. Just before she got in the car she threw a desperate look back up at the ship and saw us at the rail. We waved. Her face worked. A word formed on her lips. Good-by, she said, probably not to us. Probably to Omaha, where the house and the grocery store were gone and couldn't be returned to, and to Minnesota, where her roots were cut, and to the only one who could have dealt with her problems for her, who had gone off that deck feet first, sewn into a sack, thirty-six hours before. Good-by. And vanished into a confusion hardly less than what he had gone into.

 

April 4, Hotel d'Angleterre:

Quiet run this morning down the Øresund in the rain, with Sweden dim on the left and Denmark dim on the right. Hamlet's castle at Helsingør loomed up awhile, guarding the narrows, and then a stretch of shore with villages and houses like Monopoly pieces among the leafless trees, and then Copenhagen, the harbor full of traffic, the Little Mermaid wet and cold on her rock, and finally we nudged and snuggled against a pier overhung with a railed platform on which hundreds of people smiled and waved and held up signs:
Velkommen til Danmark. Velkommen Doktor Holger Hansen. Velkommen Onkel Oskar. Jeg Elsker Dig, Kristin Møllerup.

The rain came down on them, half of them without umbrellas, and their wet faces shone, and they cheered and waved and held up their banners till the rain melted the paper and ran the paint. Altogether the healthiest, happiest people we have ever seen.
We
feel like something brought up by grappling hooks, but we are happy to accept their wavings and welcomings as if they were meant for us personally. Escaped from the deep. Praise the Lord.

As I write this, Ruth has gone hunting an
apothek
or some place where she can buy toothpaste and postcards. She is all recovered, I am still woozy. I sit here by the window overlooking the big square called Kongens Nytorv, nibbling Rullemops and drinking
akvavit,
and take a look at Copenhagen. The center of the square is all one leafless park. Across it I can see some copper spires, and some castle towers, and narrow streets winding away from the square. All around Kongens Nytorv crimson banners hang out the windows into the rain—some holiday, I assume—and a postman in a crimson coat is moving from door to door along the south side. Like the British, the Danes seem to have discovered the functions of crimson in a gray climate.

Bells are bonging the hour of four from a dozen steeples. Below me, people buy sausages from a street wagon. I pour another two fingers of cold
akvavit
and pick up another piece of slimy herring. I never much liked herring, but this is suddenly delicious. It goes with the
akvavit
in one of those subtle food-and-drink marriages like octopus, feta cheese, and ouzo in Greece. It is a form of instant naturalization. I am very glad to be here.

Just now the door opened and a maid, evidently expecting an empty room, started in. I said
something
in English. A wave of red washed upward from her neck, a blush so dark it looked painful, and she scrambled out, falling over her own feet. New, probably, a country girl just learning to make beds and scrub bathtubs and bring in morning coffee. I can't avoid the feeling that she is just such a girl as my mother was when she first got up the courage—and what an act of courage it had to be—to spend her savings on a third-class ticket to America, all by herself. I have been half joking about going back to the village she came from—Bregninge, I don't even know what island it's on—but I'm sure now I will. Tomorrow we will start negotiations for a car, and call on the rental agent whose name we got from the cherry grower on the Stockholm. We will get maps, guidebooks, phrase books. Ruth swears she will not try to learn Danish, but that doesn't have to hinder me. Already I can say
Ja tak
and
vaer saa
god and en
smuk
pige, and I am getting pretty good at the glottal stop.

On the corner, carpenters are working on the second floor of a building. I watch a boy, an apprentice he has to be, come from the street with bottles of beer spread fanwise between the fingers of both hands. Eight bottles, he carries. He disappears under the scaffolding, reappears after a while on the second floor. The carpenters lay down their tools and each takes a beer. They pass the opener around, they hoist their bottles toward one another and tilt them to their mouths. They look like a bugle corps playing “To the Colors,” and I accept their salute.